Now, a day off to fight WFH burnout

Chennai: “Are we living at work or working from home?” is a question on all our minds as the pandemic transforms our homes into offices.

As work from home (WFH) blurs personal and professional boundaries carrying with it insomnia, back aches, and anxiety emerge as common complaints of the extended work hours, some companies are offering staff a paid ‘WFH leave’ to combat burnout.

Some employees work extended hours and log in to work even on Sundays/holidays prompting some companies to offer such a downtime. Globally, Google kicked things off asking its employees to take a day off on May 22 to address WFH related burnout.

Chennai-based software product firm Freshworks offered a paid leave on July 24 to help its over 3000 employees unwind and devote time to personal tasks. With remote work emerging the norm, the company said it wanted to reward the teams for their long valuable hours put in from home. “At Freshworks, we are very mindful of employee well-being and we are looking at various ways to continue to keep our employees healthy and happy through this period. Giving a time-off on 24/7 was one of the initiatives,” a spokesperson for the company said.

The SaaS firm is also offering 14 days of paid leave to employees who might get affected due to Covid-19, or have to take care of a family member who is affected. “In places where local norms require longer quarantine, we provide up to 28 days of leave,” the company said.

Chennai-born yoga studio Sarva announced May 29 -a Friday- as a holiday for its staff to address employees’ mental well-being. The company is also offering one day in August (date will be decided soon), urging employees to log off on a day of their choice.

“We humans have never been confined to closed spaces for such a long time before Covid-19. When forced into such situations, anxiety kicks in about various issues and that’s why we decided to offer a burnout holiday,” Sarvesh Shashi, founder, Sarva and Diva Yoga, said. The idea is to help employees prioritize both personal and work tasks on each day, and establish a healthy work-life balance, he added.

HR tech startup Springworks had shut its work for its employees on July 3 to help them take a breather from a prolonged WFH season. “We saw that people had stopped taking leaves since they had no leisure activity to engage in and we thus had to take a coordinated effort to log off,” Kartik Mandaville, CEO, Springworks, said. The company has also made employees add lunch hours on the calendar so that there is no internal communications to interrupt their break and intends to make the day off a regular feature.

While realising that employee burnout is high, some others are fixing work hours. Adhesive maker, Pidilite has drawn up an official time calendar that has to be strictly followed to prevent work schedules eating into personal time, with no calls or emails during the latter. It has implemented a ‘Digital Etiquette’ for its staff to ensure they strike the right work-life balance. “We are encouraging people to follow discipline of start and end time [in a work day] and have a fixed lunch hour across the organization,” Rahul Kumar Sinha, chief human resources officer, Pidilite Industries, said. Humans are social animals and the pandemic has redefined the way we live, work and interact, he added.

HR consultants note that WFH has been new for both companies and employees, and employers need to listen to staff's woes and address them. “During such trying times, engagement with employees across the organization is very critical and any such initiative taken by employer will be taken in very positively by employees,” Neeti Sharma, senior vice president, of HR consulting firm TeamLease Services, said.

(With inputs from Mamtha Asokan)


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